This Top-5 list came to me as I drove around after work. Actually, I’m more interested in what biblical books others would say are their favorites, or what books have affected them or are affecting them the most and why. Here are mine, in really no particular order. Your answers don’t have to be as long as these.

1. The Gospel According to Luke. As far as story-tellers go, Luke may be the best writer of the four Evangelists—Luke-Acts is a sweeping narrative. More importantly, Luke opened my eyes in college to Jesus’ great love for people and justice. For me, this Gospel most clearly displays the statement on grace that Anne Lamott’s friend said to her and that she cites in Traveling Mercies: “I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” In college I also read Henri Nouwen’s wonderful masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son, which offers the best reflections on Luke 15 that I’ve ever seen, and our InterVarsity chapter explored the parable of the Shrewd Manager together in one of the most meaningful Bible studies I’ve ever been a part of.
2. The Gospel According to Matthew. I thought I was a Luke man through and through and then I came to seminary. I encountered Glen Stassen and David Gushee’s magnum opus Kingdom Ethics which sought to make the Sermon on the Mount normative and livable in today’s context, and thus rejecting Martin Luther’s relegating the Sermon’s teachings only to Christians’ inner lives. I also did all my New Testament exegetical work with Richard Beaton—which included an exegesis of Matthew class. Beaton was working on a commentary on Matthew. Seminary was a time of awakening to Jesus’ central announcement of the Kingdom of God and no other book showed me this more than Matthew. The creation and call of a new people of God is so shocking and astounding each time I read the book. It’s like a bucket of cold water when I read how God’s Kingdom is not about me, but about God, and that is a marvelous thing. I constantly struggle in the tension that the Church is supposed to be both the city on the hill, set apart from the rest of the world, announcing God’s way through good deeds, and the Church is to go out into all the world, making disciples and baptizing people in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If Luke has the most exciting narrative of the four Gospels, Matthew has my favorite theological structure—the Sermon on the Mount will kick my butt until the day I die. (As an InterVarsity alum, I’m sure my staff workers and friends on staff are aghast that I have two Gospels on my top-5 list and neither are Mark. Just breath deeply into the paper bag, friends.)
3. Exodus. Spend a little time in Exodus, especially the first eighteen chapters and you’ll quickly see why not only was this one of the most important stories for the Hebrews in their burgeoning identity as a people, but why they and their descendants—both genetic and spiritual—continually returned to this narrative to reinterpret their situations. One cannot read the Exilic texts without hearing echoes of the Exodus throughout. And the Exilic texts don’t make much sense without the Exodus story. It is a humbling story of unimaginable oppression and a faithful, listening, and active God. We explored this story in InterVarsity during the fall of my junior year and it proved to be a prophetic harbinger for what God would do in our fellowship come the spring. Also I believe God made clear to me my call to attend seminary after watching the animated version of the Exodus, The Prince of Egypt, but that is a story for another time.
4. The Letter to the Ephesians. Also a favorite from college. Through this short epistle, God continued to challenge my thoughts on race, class, gender, and how in society, we tend to allow these differences to divide us, but the beauty of the gospel is that God breaks these barriers down and forms a new family. A new faith family that through grace is able to participate in what God originally created us to be—people and a people who do good works.
5. Ecclesiastes. In my theology and film class, our professor Rob Johnston assigned us to read Ecclesiastes three times each week for ten weeks. If you ever want to get a book into your bloodstream, such an exercise is a way to go. Reading the text so many times along with Elizabeth Huwiler’s commentary made a previously mysterious and difficult book feel like home. Though Ecclesiastes is short, it is a book best read over a lifetime since it is a series of reflections gained over looking back on one’s life and forward toward the certainty of death. In my reading, I no longer saw contradictions, but paradoxes. Work can be both meaningless toil and a blessed gift from God; I think we’ve all experienced that. Ecclesiastes is still mysterious and difficult, to be sure, and so is life, even life lived in relationship with the God of the universe.

Currently the book of Jeremiah is proving to be especially challenging and life-giving.